My name is Nicholas Caldwell and I am the Director and sole shareholder of Guild Companion Publications Limited, the company licensed by Aurigas Aldebaron LLC to publish Rolemaster, Spacemaster, HARP, Shadow World and Cyradon. This is the fifth of our Director’s Briefings.
During the last month, we released a veritable library of classic products that we had recovered from the mists of copyright limbo following agreement with the original authors. Thus November saw the return of Sea Law, the original Spacemaster Companion, and all of the rest of the Spacemaster Imperium setting modules – League of Merchants, Beyond the Core, Tales from Deep Space, War on a Distant Moon and Imperial Crisis: House Devon in Turmoil. Expect to see Islands of the Oracle, a Shadow World adventure module by John Crowdis, appear as a commercial searchable pdf in early December.
Although all of these are scanned pdfs, they are searchable pdfs (barring covers). A request was made some time ago on the ICE forums regarding the possibility of having the back catalogue of scanned pdfs made searchable; a more recent request wondered whether it would be possible for customers who had purchased non-searchable pdfs on the various Mjolnir-run ecommerce stores.
GCP and Aurigas considered these requests, and having consulted with Bruce of Mjolnir who indicated that there was no easy way of extracting the sales records from the old stores, have come to the following solution. Customers who have purchased scanned pdfs from the Mjolnir store between Feb 2008 and Dec 2010 should log into that store and make screenshots of the relevant parts of their order history. Email those screenshots to the following address gcp.store.transition@gmail.com and you will receive RPGNow discount coupons to purchase the updated pdfs at a nominal price of one US dollar per product. Customers who purchased the pdfs from the much older Mjolnir store (i.e. before Feb 2008) should have a rummage around in their email archives for receipts, as we will accept those receipts as proof of purchase.
I’ve worked my way through the older scanned pdfs – some were already searchable, a handful could not be made searchable (as the scan resolution was too low), but the rest have been upgraded and the new files already uploaded onto the OneBookShelf system. All the necessary discount coupons have also been created on the OneBookShelf system. A definitive list of the scan pdfs will be posted on the ICE forums.
As an advance notice, once the rebranding programme is complete, we will be extending this offer to other pdf products that were previously available on the various Mjolnir stores.
The other big news is that our layout gurus have created the requisite layout files for HARP SF, HARP SF Xtreme and Shadow World Player Guide – The World. OneBookShelf have already validated both the hardcover and softcover editions of HARP SF, the softcover Shadow World Player Guide (which will be in full colour), and two versions of HARP SF Xtreme (hardcover with colour interior, softcover with black&white interior). The other two editions of HARP SF Xtreme (hardcover with black&white interior, softcover with colour interior) are still working their way through the system. As part of the final quality checks, we will be ordering copies from both the UK and the US printing facilities. Assuming no problems are discovered, we will then activate the products for actual sale.
The next scheduled Director’s Briefing will be presented in early January, and will discuss the progress made across the various project lines.
Best wishes,
Nicholas
Director, Guild Companion Publications Ltd.
